Something I wrote based on this GREAT photo by Kelli Oliver starring Emma.
Resting precariously atop a pile of out-dated magazines—fashion, travel, home decorating—littering the bedside table, is a small, picture frame covered in dust. A woman lies awake in the king sized bed next to it feeling her husband’s cool, blue eyes stare blankly, boring holes into her. She turns the picture around and shifts to a more comfortable position. Wiping her dusty fingertips onto the bed sheets, she remembers hearing somewhere that dust is just millions of dead skin particles. She thinks how appropriate it is to be shedding her skin on him tonight.
The house has been quiet since he left. The children aren’t crying to drown out their parents’ deafening arguments. She isn’t lying awake at night at the far end of the bed, counting the ticks of the grandfather clock, the silence between them suffocating her. The fighting started the first time he left, and each time he leaves it only gets worse. But where normal couples would call it quits, they must pursue.
She knows the children felt the tension over strained dinner table conversations, and they feel it now when they hear her bedroom lock click into place, and five minutes later when muffled screams escape through the cracks in the door. They deserve better, they do. But most days she can’t even look at them.
It’s not their fault, she tells herself over and over and over. It’s not their fault that even though half of their genes belong to her, she cannot see herself in any part of them. It’s not their fault that their parents rushed into things, or that those nurturing instincts that everyone told their mother would come after she had a child never showed up, or that their father still chose to leave, or that mommy is going to lose her mind anchored down here.
Everyone told her she had such a bright future, she could do anything, and at some point or another she had wanted to be everything: a marine biologist, a news reporter, a traveling light bulb salesman, the options were endless! No one had expected her to get married so young. No one had expected her to ever have children. And now the lives of these children consume her. They are all she has, just as she is all they have, and no one’s happy about the arrangement. They scream and sob when Daddy leaves, knowing they will be stuck with her. Their cold eyes belong to him, watching, judging.
After exhausting days of chauffeuring kids, attending PTO meetings, fixing dinners, and tucking in, she is left to her thoughts in the darkness of her room. A map hangs on her wall, covered in marks of the places she wants to visit. She longs to leave this place where she is continuously reminded of her failure and the guilt that goes along with the desire to escape.
The guilt. If she admires one quality of his, it is his evasion of the guilt. When he is gone he is noble and brave. When he is home he has the whole empathetic world on his side. Either way, he uses his slippery tricks to leave her to bear this weight alone.
That night, in bed, with the dust still on her fingertips, she decides that she is done having this guilt, these children, this crumbling marriage thrust upon her. Done! For years she has been festering in anger, aware of every second of her life ticking by. At last she can go to all of those places she has never been, do the things she has yet to do! She feels the chains slip away as she drifts to sleep with a smile on her face, aware, in some distant corner of her mind, that when she wakes up, these thoughts will be mere foggy dreams. But for now she is content to believe that it is possible. That for once he will be the one stranded alone; he will feel her steady gaze upon him while he lies in the darkness.
21
